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I, who had taken up writing as a last resort, a gamble which might, on a hundred-to-one chance, win where everything else had failed, had now reached the point where that had failed, too. Campbell's surmise was correct; with the pretence of asking him to the Cape for a week-end of fishing and sailing I had lured him there to tell him of my discouragement and my determination to quit.
Wingate," says he, "it's a deal. I'm going to go you, though I think you're plunging on a hundred-to-one shot. Some day I'll tell you more about myself, maybe. But now I'm going to take your advice and the position. I'll do my best, and I must say you're a brick. Thanks awfully." "Good enough!" I says. "Now you go and tell her, and I'll write the letter to Dillaway."
Perhaps it was a consolation to them to know that he was enjoying himself. As for Adeline, how shall I describe her emotions? She was stunned. Before her very eyes the stone which the builders had rejected had become the main thing, the hundred-to-one shot had walked away with the race. A rush of tender admiration for Cuthbert Banks flooded her heart. She saw that she had been all wrong.
Is she suited to my brain capacity when I am not exalted by physical emotion? Am I going to curb my selfishness and behave decently towards her? If he cannot answer these questions satisfactorily he may know that he is undertaking a hundred-to-one chance of peace and happiness.
But I protest that not any of the chroniclers do even-handed justice to the little band of patriot riflemen doing their utmost to hold a hundred-to-one outnumbering host in check. 'Twas a fine sight, be the onlooker Whig or Tory.
Belmont whistled. The dragoman stood staring with his mouth half-open, and a curious slaty tint in his full, red lips. The others looked from one to the other with an uneasy sense that there was something wrong. It was the Colonel who broke the silence. "By George, Belmont, I believe the hundred-to-one chance has come off!" said he. "What's the meaning of this, Mansoor?" cried Belmont harshly.
That Parker was an habitual user of the drug could be easily seen from the most casual inspection, but that it would prove an open sesame to the girl's confidence was, as the detective afterward testified, "a hundred-to-one shot." "Poor Jim!" exclaimed the girl. "Couldn't you smuggle some into the Tombs for him?" Peabody took the hint. Of course he could.
Whenever I give one of those little stretches and swell up a bit that's a sign I am commencing to get wealthy. I switched over and took a couple of gin fizzes, and then it hit me I was richer than Jay Gould ever was; I had the Rothschilds backed clear off the board; and I made William H. Vanderbilt look like a hundred-to-one shot. You understand, Jim, this was yesterday.
Still he had learned in his fight with the world to look at everything from a practical standpoint, and he had not gone very far before his natural shrewdness asserted itself. "It won't do, Campbell," he soliloquized, with an unconscious sigh. "You 're 'playing a dead one. It's a hundred-to-one shot in the first place, and there is Arthur in the second. I wonder how he is to-day.
He plays a hundred-to-one shot like he was puttin' money on a favorite. And he waves me on my way with never a wink of them keen eyes. "Gee!" thinks I. "Billed for a masked marvel act, ain't I? Well, that bein' the case, this is where I get next to Pettigrew or tear something loose." Didn't need any seventh-son work to locate him. The 'phone book shows he lives on Madison Avenue.
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